So What Happens Now?

We've gone the full distance, now, from 'It's irresponsible and dangerous to try to discredit election results' to 'this rigged election was stolen by a conspiracy led by a hostile foreign power.'

The Electoral College hasn't voted yet. The President of the United States has ordered the results of the election to be reviewed in full, with the results of the review kept secret from the American people. That link, by the way, is to Russia Today -- a site the President's team would tell you was part of the very conspiracy he is citing. So the emphasis on his refusal to come clean with the American people is Russian propaganda designed to undermine our faith in the government.

7 comments:

I don't get the whole story. No one claims the leaked emails weren't real. Unless I haven't been paying enough attention, I don't think we're even getting the tired old "maliciously edited and taken out of context" defense. Who cares who leaked them or why? Would Clinton and Obama be hyperventilating if a foreign government had leaked devastating Trump documents, or would they be winking and smirking?

Now I guess I have my answer: the stories are starting to hint (with unsubstantiated reports and "no comment" comments from unidentified officials) that the Russkis tried to infiltrate the Republicans' emails, too, but either failed or chose not to publish them. So if the time-honored standard is that an R hack means the story is about the content but a D hack means the story is about the source, then a combined R/D hack means that the D part is about the source, and the R part would be about the content except that those awful Rs skillfully protected their content, or else those awful Russkis prevented us from seeing the R content that everyone has a right to see, no matter what the source, because free press.

Here's a story that ran right before the election that claims significant insight into Putin's intelligence machine. I have no idea how good it is, but it ran in Newsweek (for whatever that's still worth).

I wonder how long Trump will be in office before he's impeached. Indeed, I'm beginning to wonder if he'll make it into office.

"And let’s always keep one fact in mind. Those who decry the impact of the leaks are effectively taking the position that it would have been better for the American people to have cast their votes in ignorance. That the problem with the leaks wasn’t that they were lies: it was that they revealed unpleasant truths. The provenance of the documents, and how they came to light is secondary or tertiary: the content is primary. If your defense is “it’s an outrage I got caught and those who caught me are dirty bastards”, you deserve no deference or sympathy.

That's what they don't understand. All this talk about "fake news" is nonsense: it's not the fake news that works. Rumors from dodgy websites no one has ever heard of don't really move the needle, even if they convince someone's crazy uncle (who was probably already convinced of his opinions on the election, anyway).

No, what made the leaks so powerful was that they were true. Truth is a force multiplier in information warfare.

Perhaps you should read the biblical prophecies if you want to know what happens next, Grim.

My position on Russia is the same as before on the Crimea topic.

Russian infiltration is far stronger in the Alt Right and white supremacists, than in Trum or HRC or DC. Russia lost most of their weapons control codes when they lost the Soviet Union and their primary coup de grace weapon, the Leftist alliance, mutated and went rogue. It's still going to kill the US, but Russia has no real handle on it any more. So they can't stop it from killing Russia along with the US, but they can try.